1I don't know why he stands out against the darkness, because his black trenchcoat seems woven from the shadows around him. And maybe it's that darkness that draws me in, like a black hole, or maybe all my wishes are going to come true.
His kiss is brutal, and his hands are bruising, and yet I feel no bruises blossoming into a garden of midnight roses along my skin. This sort of touch I know well, the touch of an artist, or a writer. Or musician. A prodigy's touch- and I want to hope, but that is too much, so I slide my hands under the coat along the smooth planes of his chest. Tonight there was a metor shower, and the shooting stars are still falling.
Is it too late to wish? I want to ask, but we're already walking hand-in-hand along cobbled streets, my feet sliding on the stones as my skirts brush against my legs. These skirts hide my cold secrets, and my scars, but I'd gladly bare myself before this man if it did not mean what it always must. I know how this story should end, and yet I still allow him to slide an arm around my waist, and I even huddle closer to him. Maybe he knows, maybe he can end this.
Another wish, and another star falls.
My skirt flares up, French lace and taffeta settling gently down around me as I seat myself in an enormous, overstuffed armchair. The petticoats and the layers of my dress cloak the world in a gentle haze before they make a home about my legs, and even as I brazenly allow my calves to peek out from the edges of my skirt I know that my secrets are safe. He asks me if I'd like tea, his voice smoother and deeper than even I might have expected. It sounds like molten silver flowing from his lungs. Given enough time, I might fall in love with him.
Given enough time, I think, idly running my hands over the bloodstains tattooed on my palms, I might even be able to love him.
He returns in a moment, his trenchcoat vanished and his shirt unbuttoned. Even his waistcoat and trousers seem woven of the night sky, I think, as the stars continue to fall like there are enough of them to last an eternity. The pair of mugs in his hands find a home upon the table before he climbs into the armchair next to me, cloaking me with his darkness and letting me taste his peculiarly alluring mixture of night and honey. His hands begin to wander over the curves of my body, and I grasp his wrists as he makes his way up towards my thighs. Those secrets are not for him, not yet, and so I return his hands gently and sip at my tea instead. No sugar, just the way I like it.
Maybe wishes can come true, and I imagine as another star streaks across the sky and I slough off my secrets in a special way only I know so that they remain hidden in my petticoats.
It is not until we lie still again, sweatdrops clinging to his dark hair and glinting like the night as stars fly past in twos and threes, that he opens his mouth again and I am cast in molten silver as he speaks and asks where I have come from. Like the statue I feel to be, I freeze in the presence of this god of the night. My mouth is open, and I'm poised to spill the truth across the planes of his body, but I resist and tell him instead that I fell with the stars.
He believes this, and yet he still dips his head to my palm and asks why my palms are tattooed dark with bloodstains.
"Because I need to remember," I tell him, and he believes this, as well. How bright he shines for me through his own darkness!
I trail my toes in the cotton sea of my petticoats, covering the floor like water. Somewhere in them, my secret lies hidden like a loaded gun, and he cannot see.
Oh, that he could see, I dream as he kisses me again, his hand trailing up to my collarbone cold like silver, hard like silver, dead like silver. Instead of following the lines of my skeleton all the way up, he pauses somewhere between my breasts, and over my heart.
I glance down, and he's pressing my secret against my heart: a revolver, cool and smooth as his voice. Only one chamber is loaded, though, and I wonder whether he knows that he's playing a game of Russian roulette with me at the moment.
"You've had your turn," he whispers, his breath sweet and dark against my face, "and now it's mine."
And maybe, I think, watching the stars fall far and wide through the window as he tips my head back and presses his cold silver muzzle to my throat, it was just this simple.
Maybe.
The revolver clicks once, twice, three times, and then the fourth is a click and a bang that ends in the window behind me becoming a shower of shooting stars, illuminated by the metors outside. Not tonight, perhaps. Because I have known these hands for an eternity, and cannot forget them as long as I live.
In the armchair, he draws me closer, and I can see the last shooting star reflected in his eyes as silver pools in my belly.